With “incantatory prose” that “sweeps over the reader like a
dream” (Philadelphia Inquirer),
Hoffman follows her celebrated bestseller The Probable Future with an
evocative work that traces the lives of the various occupants of an old
Massachusetts house over a span of two hundred years.

In a rare and gorgeous departure, beloved novelist Alice
Hoffman weaves a web of tales, all set in Blackbird House. This small farm on
the outer reaches of Cape Cod is a place that is as bewitching and alive as the
characters we meet: Violet, a brilliant girl who is in love with books and with
a man destined to betray her; Lysander Wynn, attacked by a halibut as big as a
horse, certain that his life is ruined until a boarder wearing red boots arrives
to change everything; Maya Cooper, who does not understand the true meaning of
the love between her mother and father until it is nearly too late. From the
time of the British occupation of Massachusetts to our own modern world, family
after family’s lives are inexorably changed, not only by the people they love
but by the lives they lead inside Blackbird House.

These interconnected narratives are as intelligent as they
are haunting, as luminous as they are unusual. Inside Blackbird House more than
a dozen men and women learn how love transforms us and how it is the one
lasting element in our lives. The past both dissipates and remains contained
inside the rooms of Blackbird House, where there are terrible secrets, inspired
beauty, and, above all else, a spirit of coming home.

From the writer that Time has said tells “truths powerful
enough to break a reader’s heart” comes a glorious travelogue through time and
fate, through loss and love and survival. Welcome to Blackbird House.

Download and start listening now!

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Quotes & Awards

“Alice Hoffman’s writing is spellbinding and not simply
because of her touches of magic realism: Her unembellished prose and
primary-colored descriptions recall the directness of fairy tales.”

Wall Street Journal

“The stories of Blackbird
House are sharp and imbued with magic. Hoffman peels away layers of time,
painstakingly sifting through two centuries to expose all that can occur by one
field of pink sweet peas at the end of the world.”

USA Today

“The landscape Alice Hoffman displays in Blackbird House is its own world
altogether…Here the relationship of the characters to their surroundings is
seen as a kind of magical bond, expressed in language that is both eerie and
beautiful.”

New York Times Book Review

“Sweet, sad, touching, and most of all, vibrantly real…Each
tale stays true to Hoffman’s form, infused with descriptions of nature, rich
emotion, and life’s complexity—each, like a fairy tale, mysterious, bewitching,
and wonderful.”

Elle

“Riveting…haunting…masterful.”

Los Angeles Times

“Blackbird House is
filled with symbols of the strongest human emotions—hope, devotion, anger,
pain. And these are described as beautifully and simply as nature itself.”

San Jose Mercury News

“Lush, figurative language evokes epics, ballads, odes, and
fairy tales. Human destiny is determined less by individual initiative or moral
choice than by fate. To survive and thrive, one must pay heed, one must be
attentive to season, history, spirit.”

Boston Globe

“A New England historical patchwork, a literary museum…Hoffman
creates many charming and intriguing people and events to carry her tale.”

San Francisco Chronicle

“[Hoffman’s] prose can cast a spell upon even the most stoic
of souls, pulling them into [her] reality as easily as the tides claiming
unwary swimmers…Storytelling doesn’t get any better.”

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Complex and intriguing…Hoffman’s blend of myth and local
history is beguiling and uplifting.”

Baltimore Sun

“Hoffman does everything right in these lyrical stories,
rich with metaphor and meaning.”

Orlando Sentinel

“The stories showcase Hoffman’s own magical powers of
description, demonstrated here by vivid evocations of the lush natural world
that springs, almost miraculously, from the sparse and sandy soil.”

Hartford Courant

“Exquisite…Hoffman captures perfectly the power of place,
the pull that a land and a house can exert on the imagination and the heart.”

“This
full-cast recording is the perfect production for Alice Hoffman’s linked
stories of life on a two-hundred-year-old Cape Cod farm. The stories farthest
removed from us in time are the most magical in genre…Hoffman fans should be delighted.”

AudioFile

“[A] deeply moving achievement of lyric power.”

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Perhaps Hoffman writes so confidently about magical
occurrences because her fecund and radiant creativity is itself a form of
magic. It certainly seems as though her entrancing and mythological tales flow
like water from a spring…As the
stories leapfrog from colonial times toward the present, Hoffman, a subtle
conjurer of telling details and ironic predicaments, orchestrates intense
romances and profound sacrifices.”

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